You say you want marketing news and commentary? Well, you came to the right place. The Big Fat Marketing Blog is updated daily by the editors of Chief Marketer, Direct, Promo and Multichannel Merchant. Opinions? Oh yeah, we got em'. Don't say we didn't warn ya'.
“Visit Iceland’s Volcanic Eruption”: If you opted in to receive e-mails from Discover the World, a tour operator specializing in off-the-beaten-track locales (Antarctica, Greenland, the Falkland Islands), that subject line no doubt grabbed your attention. It did mine.
This Easter-related promotional e-mail from food gifts cataloger/retailer Harry & David won us over for several reasons:
1) The subject line stands out. Amid an inbox filled with subject lines screaming about money-saving offers (“SPRING SALE + LAST DAY FREE SHIPPING” from Overstock.com; “Free Shipping Plus NEW Lower Prices on Flea & Tick,” from Dog.com; “LAST DAY for Free Shipping on Our New Pink Label Styles,” from Shape FX), “Ear-resistible! Exclusive Easter Gifts They’ll Love…” kept me from automatically deleting the message. True, the call to action is subtle, and I’d love to see a test of this subject line against a harder seller. But the pun piqued my interest enough to lead me to open the message.
Yes, yes, Spiegel had sent an E-mail We Love just a few weeks ago. But you’re only as good as your last message, and the last message I received from fashion merchant irked me with its insincerity.
The e-mail from leather-good manufacturer/marketer Col. Littleton in response to my online catalog request isn’t the prettiest I’ve ever seen; it’s just a few lines of text, no graphics, not even a logo. Even so, it conveys the brand’s down-home ethos better than most other thank-you e-mails I’ve received.
While any e-mail that includes a discount offer is one we like, there’s something else in this welcome e-mail from cataloger Spiegel that elevates this to an e-mail we love: the link to “the quiz that reveals your signature style.”
It’s just about impossible to talk to an e-mail marketing professional without the word “relevance” cropping up in the conversation. Yet for all the talk of making e-mails more relevant to the individual recipients, it seems that most marketers still send out one-size-fit-all messages that address their needs rather than those of the potential customers.
One reason: Few marketers bother to find out exactly what their opt-in subscribers want from their e-mails, judging by the three dozen sites I visited recently. In fact, most didn’t even trouble themselves to ask if I preferred HTML or text messages.
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